Stephen Mithen
1999
Monograph Series No. 33
THE INSTITUTE FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH
Problem-solving and
the Evolution of
Human Culture
Copyright © 1999 The Institute for Cultural Research
The right of The Institute for Cultural Research to be identified as the
owners of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved
Copyright throughout the world
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photographic, by recording or
any information storage or retrieval system or method now known or to be
invented or adapted without prior permission obtained in writing from the
publisher, The Institute for Cultural Research, except by a reviewer
quoting brief passages in a review written for inclusion in a journal,
magazine, newspaper or broadcast.
Requests for permission to reprint, reproduce, etc. to:
The Institute for Cultural Research, PO Box 2227, London NW2 3BW
Monograph Series No. 33
This version prepared for free download 2006.
The original hard copy edition:
ISSN 0306 1906 – ISBN 0 904674 25 8 – Published 1999
may be purchased from the address given above, or on the ICR website,
www.i-c-r.org.uk
Opinions expressed in monographs published by the Institute for Cultural
Research are to be taken as those of the authors.
2
THE AUTHOR
Steven Mithen is Professor of Early Prehistory and Head of the
School of Human and EnvironmentalSciences at the University of
Reading. He studied subjects ranging from fine art to computer
science at the Universities of London, Sheffield and York, before
specialising in archaeology at Cambridge. Since moving to the
University of Reading in 1992, he has directed excavations in
western Scotland and southern Jordan, used computer simulation
for archaeological research and become a leading figure in the
development of ‘cognitive archaeology’. In 2004 he was elected a
Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Thoughtful
Foragers: A Study in Prehistoric Decision Making (1990), The
Prehistory of the Mind (1996), Creativity in Human Evolution and
Prehistory (1998), Hunter-Gatherer Landscape Archaeology
(2000), After the Ice (2003) and The Singing Neanderthals (2005).
Author’s Note
This paper derives from a presentation at Human Solutions:
Problem Solving and Society, a seminar given by the Institute for
Cultural Research in January 1998. I am most grateful for having
been invited to participate in that meeting, to the other speakers and
audience for their questions and comments, and for the opportunity
to publish this paper.
3
Problem-Solving and the Evolution
of Human Culture
We are surrounded by testaments to the remarkable human capacity
to solve problems. In our daily lives we depend upon technological
solutions to the practical problems of living within the world. Our
clothes, our houses, our telephones, our cars and so on through
endless material items, solve the problems that arise from the
interaction of our desires with the environments within which we
live. Occasionally in our lives we require extraordinary
technological solutions, such as medical equipment when we
become ill. Indeed perhaps it is in the domain of medicine that the
human capacity for solving problems is most valued and has its
greatest achievements. That capacity lies within individual human
minds, and more effectively within the collaboration of minds,
either by one person building upon the knowledge gained by
previous generations, or by the joint research of many specialists,
each of whom can add a tiny snippet to the solution of a problem
that is too great for any single mind alone.
There are, of course, other sorts of problems that humans try to
solve beyond those of medicine, or those which involve technical
innovations. Painters try to solve problems of how to express pure
emotion through colour and form; poets how to convey more than
just the meaning of words through words alone; sportsmen how to
surpass the seemingly physical constraints of the human body to
run like cheetahs or to swim like fish; comedians how to make
people laugh. And of course there are scientists – not just those
applied scientists who invent better computers, better cars, and new
gadgets for the kitchen, but those who tackle problems which lack
any apparent utilitarian benefit: the problem of how the universe
came into existence; how it will end; the problems of pure
mathematics; the problem of whether there is life elsewhere in the
cosmos. All of these are fascinating problems requiring considerable investment of the state’s resources for the funding of research
within universities; all seem to be of no practical value and all are
4
probably completely unsolvable. But do not think for a moment that
a time will come when people give up on them. For the human
mind is a most peculiar entity, it is like a three-year-old child at
Christmas: it just cannot sit still.
Never forget just how peculiar the problem-solving human mind
actually is. To remind yourselves just think of our closest living
relative, the chimpanzee. As is commonly known we share 99% of
our DNA with this species of African ape, having also shared a
common ancestor about 6 million years ago. Now chimpanzees
need to solve many problems in their day-to-day lives. Some
chimpanzees need to solve the problem of how to get termites out
of their nests, and do so by using sticks from which they strip the
leaves and sharpen to a point (Goodall 1986). Others tackle
problems of how to get kernels out of their shells, solving this by
the use of stone hammers and anvils (Boesch & Boesch 1993). All
chimpanzees face problems of building social friendships and
alliances to survive and prosper within their competitive social
groups (de Waal 1982; Byrne 1995). But whether they solve these
problems in the same way that we solve ours, by conscious thought,
is not clear to us.
Indeed quite what goes on in a chimpanzee’s mind remains
unknown. We know some things that do not – but perhaps ought
to: such as that they face problems of habitat destruction and of
poaching which threaten their very survival. I guess they have no
inkling of this threat within their minds. Moreover the problems
chimpanzees face today appear to be the same problems they have
always faced. Each generation of chimpanzees appears to begin
from scratch on the same old problems as their parents,
grandparents and all great-grandparents before them had to learn
to solve. There is quite limited social learning, and even less
teaching within their societies, and certainly no gradual
accumulation of knowledge through time (Tomasello et al. 1993;
but see Boesch 1991 for evidence of teaching). How different this
is to us humans who face problems today simply inconceivable 35
years ago when Jane Goodall began to watch the chimps of
Gombe. In that time, neither Goodall nor any other observer had
seen a chimpanzee version of, say, the Kyoto environmental
summit, or a meeting of foreign ministers – groups of chimpanzee
delegates trying to find compromise solutions to shared problems
5
which are in everybody’s best interest. As problem-solvers they
are individualists.
So although we may be momentarily impressed with the
termiting and nut-cracking activities of chimpanzees, the universe
of problems they face is static, highly constrained and personalised.
There are no problems concerned with composing verse, or telling
jokes, or solving environmental crises. There are no questions
about the origin of the cosmos or the nature of being to occupy the
chimpanzee mind.
How very different to our human mind with its seeming
compulsion not just to solve problems, but to seek new problems to
solve: problems of practical utilitarian nature, problems of
academic interest, problems to ponder in the privacy of one’s bath,
problems requiring international summits. So if the chimpanzee is
our closest living relative, and one to whom we are genetically so
similar, where could these compulsions of the human mind have
come from? Where are their roots?
The answer lies deep within our prehistoric past. This peculiar
problem-solving human mind arose during the course of human
evolution; it arose within that span of time since we diverged from
the ancestors of the chimpanzee, 6 million years ago. To understand
why the human mind is so restless, so inquiring, so desperate to
acquire knowledge we must trace back in time to that point when
our ancestors first began to distinguish themselves from all other
animals by the emergence of this curiosity about the world, this
thirst for knowledge which burns so intensely within.
When was that? When did this peculiar problem-solving human
mind emerge? The answer is not easy, as we have no more than the
mute remains of fossil skulls and the stone tools and other scant
remains of the archaeological record as our guide. Indeed
identifying when, where and why, the human mind evolved is a
problem faced by archaeologists such as myself. In this paper I
want to provide some possible solutions to these problems, by
taking you on a short journey through our prehistoric past – a
journey that has time to make just four brief stops at different points
in space and time of our evolutionary path to examine what
problems our ancestors were facing, how they were being solved,
and whether those distinctive features of our problem-solving
minds today had arisen.
6
Our starting point on this journey is with the first stone tools of
the archaeological record, those made between 2.5 and 1.5 million
years ago in East Africa and called the Oldowan culture (Leakey
1971; Toth 1985). These artefacts were first found by Mary Leakey
when she and her husband Louis Leakey excavated in Olduvai
Gorge, and have since been found in several other areas, such as
Koobi Fora (Isaac 1997). Oldowan stone tools were made by the
first member of our genus known to us, Homo habilis.
Homo habilis is a little understood species – indeed its fossil
remains are so varied in size and shape that some anthropologists
believe there are at least three different species of early homo being
represented (Wood 1992; Jones et al. 1992). Homo habilis was
quite unlike us, standing up to 1.5 metres tall and weighing between
40 and 80 kilograms. Note the word ‘standing’, as Homo habilis
walked upon two legs – although perhaps not quite as efficiently as
we do today. Such bipedalism evolved at least a million years prior
to the appearance of Homo habilis, as is evident in
australopithecine specimens such as Lucy, Australopithecus
afarensis, dating to 3.5 million years ago. In terms of brain size
Homo habilis reached a maximum of 750cc, which is about half
that of the average brain of modern humans. It is, however, more
than twice as large as that of a modern chimpanzee.
Oldowan artefacts are very intriguing. They are made from
nodules of stone, principally basalt and quartzite, by removing
flakes from what becomes known as the core. These flakes were
removed by striking directly with a hammer-stone. In many cases
we can tell from the artefacts that this was not just a random
bashing of two rocks together. Homo habilis was carefully selecting
nodules, identifying appropriate places to strike the nodule, and
using just the right amount of force at the correct angle to detach a
flake (Toth 1985; Potts 1988). The required technical skills seem to
be beyond the capacity of modern chimpanzees. One bonobo, or
pygmy chimpanzee, has had the opportunity to learn to produce
flakes from stone nodules but does not appear to be able to master
the knowledge of fracture dynamics that was clearly understood by
Homo habilis 2 million years ago (Toth et al. 1993).
But Oldowan tools are also quite different to the tools that you
and I are familiar with. They lack any imposed form. By that I mean
that Homo habilis does not appear to have had an image of a stone
7
tool in his or her mind, an artefact of a particular size and shape,
which he or she then sought to achieve in stone. Instead nodules
were simply flaked, with the final shape of the core being
determined by no more than the shape or the original nodule, and
the number of flakes removed.
So what were these cores and flakes used for? Probably their
main function was to butcher animal carcasses – the sharp flakes
could have been used for cutting skin and tendons, and for slicing
meat; the robust cores for crushing bones to extract the valuable
marrow (Potts 1988; Schick & Toth 1993). We do indeed have
direct evidence for such uses, as the tools are often found dispersed
amidst scatters of broken animal bones, such as at Olduvai Gorge.
Microscopic analysis of those bones sometimes shows the actual
presence of a cut mark where it had been detached from a carcass
or skinned. We also have indirect evidence from experimental
work today, as it has been found that Oldowan artefacts are indeed
very effective at butchery of animal carcasses. But experimental
work also indicates that Oldowan tools could have been used for
other tasks, such as removing tree bark, chopping plants, or digging
for roots.
If we remain with animal carcasses we can see how these tools
solved a problem faced by Homo habilis on the East African
savannahs of two million years ago. Now the African savannah was
not an easy place to live, especially if one had a taste for meat as
seems to have been the case for Homo habilis. There were other
animals around who also had a taste for meat, such as lions,
leopards and hyenas (Brain 1981; Binford 1983). And those
animals had a taste not only for the meat of antelope and
wildebeest, but also for Homo habilis. Compounding Homo
habilis’ problems was the fact that he was not a very big chap –
indeed he was the epitome of the prehistoric seven stone weakling.
Armed with just Oldowan tools, he seems to have lacked any ability
to hunt animals himself, and would have been quite limited in his
ability to defend himself against carnivores. So how was Homo
habilis to get his meat?
The solution appears to have been by scavenging from the kills
made by lions and other carnivores (Binford 1983; Isaac 1983).
Several of the archaeological sites show that Homo habilis was
indeed taking meat and marrow from the least productive parts of a
8
carcass, the bits that would be left behind when not only the
carnivore that killed the animal had eaten, but after the hyenas and
vultures had also gained their share. But in other cases, Homo
habilis seems to have had access to some quite productive bits of
the carcass, perhaps by being one of the very first scavengers after
the top carnivore had its fill (Bunn & Kroll 1986).
Being a scavenger on the East African savannah must have been
a fairly hazardous experience, one full of problems caused by
competing carnivores and other scavengers. We can see two ways
in which Homo habilis solved these problems. The first was in fact
a solution created by biological evolution rather than Homo habilis
himself – it was bipedalism, walking on two legs. By walking on
two legs Homo habilis could have behaved rather differently to
those other animals which had a taste for meat; he was able to go
out in the midday sun – or at least at less cost than could the
quadrupeds. By walking erect on two legs the amount of solar
radiation on a body is considerable reduced, so that when those four
legged carnivores and scavengers had to rest in the shade, Homo
habilis could search for carcasses (Wheeler 1984, 1994).
Bipedalism opened up a niche in the landscape that was
relatively little used by other carnivores. It also freed the hands for
tasks other than locomotion, tasks that included making artefacts
and carrying objects. The artefacts, the Oldowan tools, were the
second means by which the problem of accessing carcasses was
solved. Imagine yourself as Homo habilis. What would you want to
do as soon as you had found a carcass? There is only one answer –
butcher it as quickly as possible and carry parts away to a safe
eating place before other scavengers are alerted. And that is what
the stone artefacts allowed: rather than labouriously twisting and
tearing limbs off with hand alone, tendons could be swiftly sliced;
and rather than trying to break open bones with one’s teeth, a
chunky Oldowan chopper would easily crush the bone so that the
valuable marrow could be extracted. In other words, the stone tools
solved the problem of how to minimise time in those dangerous
locations where carcasses were be found (Potts 1988). But it was by
no means an easy solution. One had to be prepared, to have stone
at hand. So some archaeologists, such as Rick Potts, believe that
Homo habilis effectively created caches of stones in the landscape
which could then be used when the need arose. And we also have
9
clear evidence that stones and cores were transported around the
landscape, seemingly in anticipation of their use (Isaac 1997).
So in this first stopover on this brief journey through the
prehistory of problem-solving we can see that the first member of
our genus had a technological solution to a problem of living in the
world. But in many ways this solution was much more like that of
the chimpanzee’s solution to extracting termites, or kernels from
their shells, than the technological solutions we are used to in the
modern world. Oldowan tools were made in basically the same
manner for over a million years. Just like the chimpanzee culture
there was no gradual accumulation of knowledge, no innovation, no
creative thinking as to how a better solution could be developed.
And there seems to have been no collaborative problem-solving,
which may be because it is unlikely that Homo habilis had
any linguistic skills beyond the types of vocalisations used
by chimpanzees.
So let us now jump forward in time to another type of
pre-modern human, but one who was still surviving just 30,000
years ago: the Neanderthals. What problems did they face, and how
were they solved? First we must see how we get to the Neanderthals
from Homo habilis. We begin with a relative of Homo habilis, a
species known as Homo ergaster, splendidly represented by a 1.5
million year old skeleton from Koobi Fora known as the
Nariokotome boy (Walker & Leakey 1993). Homo ergaster was the
first of our ancestors to leave Africa – stepping out for Asia soon
after 2 million years ago (Larick & Ciochon 1996). But it was a
later descendant of Homo ergaster itself, Homo heidelbergensis,
who was the first to enter Europe, this seeming to happen about
800,000 years ago. That is when the earliest fossils in Europe are
found, those at the site of Atapuerca in Spain. At 500,000 years ago
we find H. heidelbergensis remains at Boxgrove in Sussex,
England, and after that date they are found throughout Europe.
Homo heidelbergensis was the direct ancestor of Homo
neanderthalensis, who lived in Europe and West Asia as from
250,000 years ago, with the last Neanderthals surviving in southern
Spain and Gibraltar just 30,000 years ago (Stringer & Gamble
1993). So let us consider what problems the Neanderthals faced,
and how they were tackled.
In Europe Neanderthals faced the problems of living in an icy,
10
glaciated environment. For most of their existence much of
northern Europe would have been either covered in ice, or a polar
desert. South of this the landscape would have been tundra –
although a tundra quite rich in animals such as horse, deer and
bison. Mammoths and woolly rhinos would have roamed along the
margins of the ice sheet. The winters would have been harsh, with
freezing temperatures, and severe problems with finding food and
keeping warm. So how did the Neanderthals solve these problems?
The first means appears to have been like Homo habilis, simply
by their anatomy – so this again is a problem solved by biological
evolution rather than mental capacities. Neanderthals had stout,
muscular bodies, with barrel chests and short limbs – just the sort
of anatomy suited to maintaining body heat. They had large
projecting noses to help warm the air as they breathed and most
probably carried large fat reserves on their bodies. These were
physiological adaptations solving the problem of living in a cold
climate (Trinkaus 1987; Stringer & Gamble 1993).
But Neanderthals also had large brains – brains as large as those
of modern humans, and this allowed them to solve their problems
of survival in ways quite unlike Homo habilis. For one thing they
were hunters. Even by 400,000 years ago there is evidence for
wooden spears in the archaeological record (Thieme 1997), and for
hunting activity such as at Boxgrove (Roberts 1997). The
Neanderthals made sharp stone points for their spears which appear
to have been mainly used for killing animals at short distances
(Shea 1988, 1989). These animals were predominantly deer, bison
and horse. Sometimes Neanderthals seemed to have worked
together, such as for hunting the largest of the ice age animals. At
the site of La Cotte on Jersey, for example, there are piles of
elephant bones in a cave at the base of a cliff. It seems most likely
that Neanderthals had forced a small herd of elephants off the
top of the cliff, seeming to have required some joint action
(Scott 1980).
Neanderthals had further means at their disposal to solve the
problems of living in an ice age world. One was the use of fire. In
many of the caves that they used, we find thick layers of ash across
the floor, perhaps having been spread out from hearths to make a
warm surface on which to sleep (Stringer & Gamble 1993; Mellars
1996). Now the use of fire may have been essential for warmth; but
11
it may also have been used for thawing out frozen carcasses hence
providing food not available to other scavengers especially during
those cold winter months.
Another crucial means for survival in these harsh environments
seems to have been that of simply caring for each other. A skeletal
specimen from Shanidar in Iraq, for example, is of a man who was
a cripple, blind in one eye, and clearly unable to cope for himself.
Yet we can see that his injuries had begun to heal before he died,
and there seems little doubt that he was being cared for by other
members of his group.
So we see that the Neanderthals were effective problem-solvers.
They made hunting weapons, co-operated together, used fire, cared
for each other. But while these allowed them to survive in their icy
world, it was not a particularly glamorous lifestyle; indeed they
seem to have been only just hanging onto survival. As far as we can
infer from their fossil remains, hardly any Neanderthals survived
into their late 30s; a forty year old Neanderthal would have been a
very senior citizen of their world (Trinkaus 1995). And almost all
Neanderthal individuals that we know of were suffering from
disease or injury – many bone fractures, most probably arising from
their rather hazardous hunting tactics. But these injuries, and
indeed the thickness of bone and bulk of muscle on these
Neanderthals tell us of another means they used to solve the
problems of living in an ice age – sheer hard work. Neanderthals
lived physically demanding lives, surviving by brawn as much as –
and probably more than – by brain (Trinkaus 1987). Sometimes this
was not enough: when conditions in Europe became too cold for
them, rather than inventing new ways to live they simply left
Europe, and moved further south. Or in other words they became
locally extinct.
In some ways the Neanderthals seem more like Homo habilis in
terms of their problem-solving abilities than modern humans, even
though they had brains as large as we have today and lived a mere
instant ago in evolutionary time. They had clearly hit upon good
solutions – stone-tipped spears, fire, co-operation – but then they
stuck with these through thick and thin, in warmer climates and in
colder, in the Near East, in southern, eastern, western and northern
Europe for several hundred thousand years with no innovations, no
improvements, indeed no signs of any creative thinking (Mithen
12
1996). In a manner quite unlike modern humans, Neanderthals do
not appear to have worried themselves with any problems beyond
those of survival – there are no traces of art, of story telling or
science of any sort.
Now this very narrow behavioural repertoire that they possessed,
this small range of solutions to the problems of the world, was not
a function of living in an ice age world. This is demonstrated by
considering a third member of our genus, who also lived in ice age
Europe – indeed in a period of the ice age that was even more
challenging than that faced by the Neanderthals. But these people
solved their ice age problems in quite different ways; often with
style. They were modern humans.
Modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, first evolved in Africa
between 250,000 and 100,000 years ago (Stringer & McKie 1996).
Genetic evidence provides a relatively earlier date than that of the
first fossil remains, those found at the site of Klasies River Mouth
at the tip of south Africa 125,000 years ago, and then in the caves
of Skhul and Qafzeh in the Near East 100,000 years ago where
several modern skulls are found. From their African origin, modern
humans spread throughout the globe, displacing all other human
species such as Homo erectus in Asia and the Neanderthals in
Europe. Unlike these earlier humans they also spread into Australia
and the New World. Our interest, however, is how they survived in
Europe, how they solved the problems posed by ice age landscapes,
and how their solutions contrasted with those of the Neanderthals.
It was 40,000 years ago that the first modern humans spread into
Europe, and for as much as 10,000 years they overlapped in that
continent with the Neanderthals – although whether they ever came
into face to face contact, let alone inter-bred, remains unclear
(Mellars 1996). When they entered Europe the climate was
beginning to get worse, as the last ice age was approaching its
climax. The climate of Europe continued to get colder and harsher
until the late glacial maximum was reached 20,000 years ago when
massive glaciers spread across northern Europe, creating
uninhabitable polar desert to their immediate south. So these
modern humans faced environments even more challenging than
those of the Neanderthals; moreover they lacked the physiological
adaptations. Indeed the first modern humans in ice age Europe
appear to have a rather slender morphology, the type more suited to
13
equatorial African environments (Stringer & Gamble 1993).
But while the Neanderthals appeared to have just been able to
hang onto existence, modern humans flourished in a most
spectacular manner.
Some solutions were shared with the Neanderthals: the modern
humans were hunters, they co-operated with each other, they used
fire and they cared for each other. But each of these was undertaken
in a far more effective, and creative fashion. Consider hunting. As
regards technology they not only used a much greater range of raw
materials, especially bone, antler and ivory, but they made
multi-component tools, and tools that were very specifically
designed for particular game in particular contexts – such as
particularly skilfully crafted, and lethal, spear and arrow points
used when the ice conditions were at their worst (Knecht 1993;
Straus 1991). When the climatic conditions began to improve, the
modern humans changed their weapons, innovated new designs,
suitable to the changing distributions of game and appropriate
hunting practices. This flexible innovative behaviour, this
dynamism to technology, is quite different to the great simplicity
and stability of the Neanderthal hunting weapons.
It wasn’t just hunting weapons that were invented by the modern
humans. Perhaps their most critical inventions were items such as
the tiny bone needles which first appear in the archaeological
record 18,000 years ago (Geneste & Plisson 1993). No doubt these
were used for making stitched clothing, and perhaps tents –
something that Neanderthals never appeared to have thought of
doing. Modern humans used even more radical innovations to
create their own environments, such as the construction of
mammoth-bone dwellings on the Russian plain – the first
architecture (Soffer 1985).
But constant technological innovation is just one way in which
the modern humans contrasted with the Neanderthals in their
problem-solving abilities. They also began completely new types of
behaviours, most notably the production of art. The first painted
caves and carved objects of ivory and stone appear 30,000 years
ago, and they continued to be produced throughout the ice age –
with the most intense artistic activity happening just as the ice age
climate reached its most severe (Mithen 1989; Straus 1991). The art
disappeared when the ice age came to its sudden end 10,000 years
14
ago. This association with climate gives a clue that the art was not
simply produced for aesthetic pleasure but it functioned to help the
modern humans survive in the ice age world.
Consider, for instance, the carvings known as Venus figurines.
These were carved from ivory and stone in basically the same form
throughout a vast geographical area in the period between roughly
23 and 26,000 years ago. Examples are found as far apart as
western Europe and Russia. As such they tell us that people were
linked across these vast distances into alliance networks, and these
common symbols functioned to facilitate the social negotiations
involved (Gamble 1982). Alliance networks were an essential
means of survival; they meant that when food resources were
depleted in one area, one had social links enabling the use of those
elsewhere. Such alliance networks, maintained by the use of
material culture, seem to have been notions quite beyond the
Neanderthal mind. Modern humans also made all sorts of body
decoration such as beads and pendants from materials such as
animal teeth, shell and ivory. In fact these were not just decoration;
they would have communicated information about a person’s
status, affiliation, experiences, wishes and desires (Mithen
1996). Such material culture was a means of mediating social
relationships – it helped solve the problem of personal identity and
social communication.
What about the cave paintings themselves? No doubt these made
the ice age world a brighter place, but again they were far more than
mere decoration. These paintings, and the stories and myths with
which they were no doubt associated, acted as a tribal
encyclopaedia containing crucial survival information (Pfeiffer
1982; Mithen 1989). We get some clues about this information
from the paintings themselves. We can see, for instance, how there
are references in the paintings to how animals are tracked, such as
by the depiction of their feet not as hooves but as hoof prints.
Perhaps such paintings were used in education of children, perhaps
they acted to mentally gear up a hunter. We don’t really know.
When we see carvings of flying geese from the site of Mal’ta in
Siberia, we are immediately reminded of how the sight of flying
geese for hunter-gatherers is of such importance as it tells about
imminent change in the landscape, either the beginning of the great
freeze-up of winter, or perhaps the thaw. It is not surprising that
15
such animals became enshrined in the art – animals that carry
messages as if from the gods. So this art was part of the modern
human ecological adaptation to their environment. The art
functioned to extend human memory, to hold concepts which are
difficult for minds to grasp, and to instigate creative thinking about
the solution of environmental and social problems (Mithen 1990).
Now these paintings and carvings also tell us something else
about the modern humans. They were not just worrying about the
problems of survival, but had new concerns – concerns that we still
have today. There was the problem of how to express the grace of
deer through a simple line – something that they achieved as
effectively as any artist of the renaissance or twentieth century.
There was the problem of how to represent supernatural beings, as
they appear to have done in their art with images of halfanimal/half-human figures (e.g. the bison/man figure in Chauvet
Cave, Chauvet et al. 1996). There was the problem of how to
compose music to stir the emotions, which they seem to have been
doing with their eagle-bone flutes.
It is, therefore, in this icy world inhabited by the first modern
humans in Europe that we find the first evidence for the peculiarly
creative problem-solving mentality that we possess today. But I do
not want to finish my journey through prehistory in that icy world,
for I want to make one final brief stop, a stop in the Near East at
10,000 years ago. In fact we can go to a site in Jordan known as
WF16, which I am digging myself. For it was at sites such as this,
sites in the Levant, where perhaps the most radical solution ever to
a problem faced by hunter-gatherers was made, and one which
changed the history of the world.
Recall that all of the humans we have looked at so far, Homo
habilis, the Neanderthals, the modern humans of ice age Europe
lived by hunting and gathering. So too did everyone else in the
world up until just 10,000 years ago. In the Near East people lived
as hunter-gatherers throughout the last ice age, but at about 12,000
years ago they did something radical. They settled down. They
began building permanent houses and villages; those people we call
the Natufians (Bar-Yosef 1998). Quite why this happened is not
clear as they still continued to live by hunting and gathering. It may
simply have been because game and plants were quite abundant,
and regularly replenished by migrating populations so there was no
16
need for people to be mobile. But these Natufian people then faced
a major difficulty at the end of the Pleistocene, 10,000 years ago.
At that time dramatic global warming occurred, increasing global
temperatures by as much as 7 degrees in a decade – today we fear
the consequences of a no more than 3 degree rise in temperature
over a 100 year period. Moreover this dramatic global warming
followed a period of substantial climatic fluctuation involving
periods of prolonged drought. These climatic changes would have
caused biogeographic havoc, radically changing the distribution of
food resources in the landscape. It was probably as a means to solve
a shortage of food created by these climatic fluctuations that the
Natufian hunter-gatherers of the Near East did something
highly innovative, something quite remarkable that had never been
tried before: they began farming. Rather than hunting and
gathering for their food, they planted crops, and eventually
domesticated animals.
This may not seem too original for us today, as farming is the
normal way of life; we feel that hunting and gathering is the
exception. But imagine generations upon generations of people
having relied on hunting and gathering for their food being then
faced with ideas of planting seeds, cultivating crops, domesticating
animals. In effect beginning social relationships with plants
and animals, caring for them as one would have cared for
one’s children. As a solution to food shortage it was as bizarre as it
was brilliant.
There are, of course, many details about this transition from
hunting and gathering to food production that we do not
understand. I am presently working at the site of WF16 to uncover
further information about the society and economy of the very last
hunter-gatherers of around 10,000 years ago. The dwellings at
WF16, and at all other sites of this period (such as Netiv Hagdud,
Bar-Yosef & Gopher 1997), are quite simple – small circular
structures associated with a great amount of plant grinding
equipment. Just a few hundred years later, however, once farming
had begun, we find dramatically different types of settlements. In a
space of a few hundred years settlements changed from those with
small scattered dwellings, to bustling villages, with streets and store
houses and rapidly growing populations. And what did that mean?
Well, it meant that many new problems were being created: how
17
does one solve social disputes between so many people all tied to
living within one place? Mobile hunter-gatherers could have just
moved on. How does one keep settlements hygienic with the
amounts of human waste that now accumulated, again a problem of
no concern to mobile hunter-gatherers? What does one do when the
land becomes exhausted due to over cultivation? How can one gain
sufficient supplies of raw materials for an ever growing human
population? How is the surplus from a harvest to be distributed?
So we can see that the origins of agriculture ultimately arose as
a solution to a major environmental crisis; but it in turn created a
vast number of new social and economic problems that required
solution. Therein lies the emergence and history of powerful élites
and then of civilisations.
Let me conclude by returning to early prehistory, the
hunter-gatherers whom I find of such interest. I have explained how
ever since the first emergence of our genus, the first Homo 2.5
millions years ago, technological solutions were found to the
problems of living in the world – solutions that appear to be the
roots of the technological solutions that surround us today. The
Oldowan tools of Homo habilis, the stone spear points of the
Neanderthals mediated human interaction with the world, and
extended the physical capabilities of the body. Yet for the vast
majority of human evolution, right up until a time perhaps no more
than 50,000 years ago, we see a mind solving problems that is quite
different to ours today. It was a mind that could find good solutions,
but then stuck with them for generations, rather than seeking to
innovate and improve. Creative problem-solving seems quite
absent from human experience throughout much of prehistory. It is
only with those modern humans, especially those who lived after
50,000 years ago, that we can see a truer reflection of ourselves
(Mithen 1996). People who could find radical new solutions to old
problems; people who seemed compelled to innovate and improve
upon their technology; people whose minds were restless, people
who could make that most radical leap of our past to the cultivation
of plants and domestication of animals.
So if we are looking for the roots of our problem-solving abilities
today we cannot look to just one single origin. We have to recognise
that part of this ability has its roots deep in our evolutionary past,
not just going back to early humans, or even Homo habilis but to
18
earlier ancestors such as those we shared with the chimpanzee. Yet
other aspects of our problem-solving ability, the creative,
imaginative aspects that lie behind our science and art today, are
very recent developments. These lead to radical solutions to
problems, such as the use of cave paintings as a means to solve
problems of living in an ice age world, and the cultivation of plants
to solve food shortages at the end of the Pleistocene. But radical
solutions create even more radical problems, seen most clearly in
those created by a farming lifestyle. And as global populations
increased and knowledge accumulated over the last 10,000 years
solutions have become ever more radical, creating in their wake
ever more serious problems for us to tackle. The result is that today
we face multiple global environmental crisis, bloody warfare and
terrorism blight so many parts of the world, social deprivation,
poverty and disease are pervasive among human populations. That
restless, creative mind that emerged 50,000 years ago is continually
giving us more problems to worry about, problems that seem to be
beyond our comprehension – the most recent are the ethical
dilemmas about genetic manipulation and cloning, those about
whether we should begin to design life itself. Indeed, perhaps it
might have been better if we had kept that rather plodding problemsolving mentality of the Neanderthals and hence never had these
problems to face; but then neither would we have had the art of
Lascaux, nor the poetry of Shakespeare, nor the science of Darwin
and Einstein with which to fill our minds.
19
References
Bar-Yosef, O. 1998. The Natufian culture in the Levant, threshold to the
origins of agriculture. Evolutionary Anthropology 6, 159-77.
Bar-Yosef, O. & Gopher, A. 1997. An Early Neolithic Village in the
Jordan Valley: Netiv Hagdud. Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum.
Binford, L. 1983. In Pursuit of the Past. London: Thames & Hudson.
Boesch, C. 1991. Teaching among wild chimpanzees. Animal Behaviour,
41, 530-2.
Boesch, C. & Boesch, H. 1983. Optimisation of nut-cracking with natural
hammers by wild chimpanzees. Behaviour, 83, 265-86.
Brain, C.K. 1981. The Hunters or the Hunted? Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Bunn, H.T. & Kroll, E.M. 1986. Systematic butchery by Plio-Pleistocene
hominids at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Current Anthropology 27,
431-452.
Byrne, R.W. 1995. The Thinking Ape: Evolutionary Origins of
Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chauvet, J-M., Deschamps, E.B. & Hillaire, C. 1995. La Grotte Chauvet.
Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Gamble, C. 1982. Interaction and alliance in Palaeolithic society. Man 17,
92-107.
Geneste, J.-M. & Plisson, H. 1993. Hunting technologies and human
behaviour: lithic analysis of Solutean shouldered points. In Before
Lascaux: The Complex Record of the Early Upper Palaeolithic, eds.
H. Knecht, A. Pike-Tay & R. White, pp. 117-35. Boca Raton: CRC
Press.
Goodall, J. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Isaac, G. 1983. Bones in contention: competing explanations for the
juxtaposition of Early Pleistocene artefacts and faunal remains. In
Animals and Archaeology: Hunters and their Prey, eds. J.
Clutton-Brock & C. Grigson, pp. 3-19. Oxford: British Archaeological
Reports International Series 163.
Isaac, G. (ed.) 1997. Koobi Fora Research Project, Vol. 5:
Plio-Pleistocene Archaeology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Jones, J.S., Martin, R. & Pilbeam. D. 1992. eds. The Cambridge
Encyclopaedia of Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Knecht, H. 1993. Splits and wedges: the techniques and technology of
early Aurignacian antler working. In Before Lascaux: The Complex
Record of the Early Upper Palaeolithic, eds. H. Knecht, A. Pike-Tay &
R. White, pp. 137-61. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
20
Larick, R. & Ciochon, R.L. 1996. The African emergence and early
African dispersals of the Genus Homo. American Scientist 84, 538-551.
Leakey, M. 1971. Olduvai Gorge. Volume 3. Excavations in Beds I and II,
1960-1963. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mellars, P. 1996. The Neanderthal Legacy: An archaeological perspective
from western Europe. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Mithen, S. 1988. Looking and learning: Upper Palaeolithic art and
information gathering. World Archaeology 19, 297-327.
Mithen, S. 1989. To hunt or to paint? Animals and art in the Upper
Palaeolithic. Man 23, 671-95.
Mithen, S. 1990. Thoughtful Foragers: A Study of Prehistoric Decision
Making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mithen, S. 1996. The Prehistory of the Mind. London: Thames & Hudson.
Pfeiffer, J. 1982. The Creative Explosion. New York: Harper & Row.
Potts, R. 1988. Early Hominid Activities at Olduvai Gorge. New York:
Aldine de Gruyter.
Roberts, M. 1997. Boxgrove. Current Archaeology 153, 324-333
Schick, K. & Toth, N. 1993. Making Silent Stones Speak: Human
Evolution and the Dawn of Technology. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Scott, K. 1980. Two hunting episodes of Middle Palaeolithic age at La
Cotte de Saint-Brelade, Jersey. World Archaeology 12, 137-52.
Shea, J.J. 1988. Spear points from the Middle Palaeolithic of the Levant.
Journal of Field Archaeology 15, 441-450.
Shea, J.J. 1989. A functional study of the lithic industries associated with
hominid fossils in the Kebara and Qafzeh caves, Israel. In The Human
Revolution, eds. P. Mellars & C. Stringer, pp. 611-625. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Soffer, O. 1985. The Upper Palaeolithic of the Central Russian Plain.
New York: Academic Press.
Straus, L. 1991. Southwestern Europe at the last glacial maximum.
Current Anthropology 32, 189-99.
Stringer, C. & Gamble. C. 1993. In Search of the Neanderthals. London:
Thames & Hudson.
Stringer, C. & McKie, R. 1996. African Exodus. London: Pimlico.
Thieme, H. 1997. Lower Palaeolithic hunting spears from Germany.
Nature 385, 807-810.
Tomasello, M., Kruger, A.C., & Ratner, H.H. 1993. Cultural Learning,
Behavioural and Brain Sciences 16, 495-552.
Toth, N. 1985. The Oldowan reassessed: A close look at early stone
artefacts. Journal of Archaeological Science 12, 101-120.
Toth, N., Schick, K.D., Savage-Rumbaugh, S.E., Sevcik, R.A. &
Rumbaugh, D.M. 1993. Pan the tool-maker: Investigations into the
21
stone tool-making and tool-using capabilities of a Bonobo (Pan
piniscus). Journal of Archaeological Science 20, 81-91.
Trinkaus, E. 1987. Bodies, brawn, brains and noses: human ancestors and
human predation. In The Evolution of Human Hunting, eds. M.H.
Nitecki & D.V. Nitecki, pp. 107-145, New York: Plenum Press.
Trinkaus, E. 1995. Neanderthal Mortality Patterns. Journal of
Archaeological Science 22, 121-142.
Waal, de. F. 1982. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes.
London: Jonathan Cape.
Walker, A. & Leakey, R. (eds.) 1993. The Nariokotome Homo Erectus
Skeleton. Berlin : Springer Verlag.
Wheeler, P. 1984. The evolution of bipedality and the loss of functional
body hair in hominids. Journal of Human Evolution 13, 91-98.
Wheeler, P. 1994. The thermoregulatory advantages of heat storage and
shade seeking behaviour to hominids foraging in equatorial savannah
environments. Journal of Human Evolution 26, 339-350.
Wood, B. 1992. Origin and evolution of the genus Homo. Nature 355,
783-790.
22